Exploring Fear in Howl, Basketball Diaries, and Cats Cradle

yacketayakking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and eyeball kicks and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars (Ginsberg 11). Like many authors of the modern literature movement, Allen Ginsberg explores the bombs psychological affects on many Americans during the 1960s. Modern literature describes the chaos of the 1960s, caused by increasing societal problems and fear of the new atomic bomb. Writings such as The Basketball Diaries, Howl and Cats Cradle express concepts of fear, power, governmental control, and death. Government uses societys fear of death and the end of the world to keep control and power over the people. The atomic bomb generates such universal fear and the corrupted government fails†¦show more content†¦Dr. Hoenikker is oblivious to the consequences of his actions and inventions. He thinks of life as a game: Why should I bother with made-up games when there are so many real ones going on? (Vonnegut 17). He doesnt understand the seriousness of the products of his power. Felix illustrates, on an individual level, the type of corruption in government that Carroll and Ginsberg describe in The Basketball Diaries and Howl. The government not only lacks an understanding of the people, but seems not to care. The governments control of the world, like Dr. Hoenikkers, includes the tremendous power to end existence. The governments power is playing games with society when considering the use of the nuclear bomb. The government causes the people of the world to live in fear, waiting for the bomb to drop. This power that Dr. Hoenikker and the government hold could be used in a much more constructive way, to help society instead of destroying it. An image in Cats Cradle that proves how fear is used to control a population, is that of the hook in San Lorenzo. The hook, and fear of it, parallels the bombs significance according to Carroll and Vonnegut. The hook is supposedly used in San Lorenzo to execute anyone who practices the illegal faith, Bokononism. Though everyone in San Lorenzo practices this faith, and the hook hasnt been used in many years, the fear that is stimulated by the hook